asokoloski

I think they try to stay pretty explicitly neutral about advocating a particular density, it's just that they want people to be realistic about how much a particular kind of development costs. Suburbs are perfectly fine -- but if they were taxed to a degree that reflects their actual infrastructure cost, it would be much more expensive to live in them. There's currently a bizarre pattern where poorer, older, higher-density urban neighborhoods end up subsidizing richer suburbs.

Likewise, it's fine if you want to live out on a farm well away from other people -- but the town shouldn't pay a million dollars to run a paved road and water supply out to your house, when a dirt road and a well is good enough.

The problem is that we all want something for nothing. We all want to live in low-density suburbs like you love, but since charging enough in taxes to pay for them would not be very politically popular, instead we've run up massive infrastructure liabilities, depending on unsustainable exponential growth for funding to fix the old infrastructure.

Would you still love the suburbs as much if your property taxes were 2x or 4x what they are now? If you would still want to live in a suburb, great, no problem. But many people would probably rather choose to move to a denser area and pay a more reasonable tax rate.

I had a similar reaction, after trying out Ansible at my last job. We ended up switching to fabric, which is all in Python. It was mostly good but had some awkward warts, which it seems that they've mostly addressed in fabric2. Anyway, it might be worth a look, based on my understanding of your use case.

Seconded! Also, the criticism in this article about lack of diversity doesn't apply very much to Worm (and its sequel, Ward).

To give some examples -- one of the protagonists of Ward is gay, as are two of the antagonists. One of the protagonists is trans. One is black. Two are Hispanic. One of the side characters (a hero) is a recovering homophobe. Another side character is a white supremacist who's trying to turn over a new leaf.

One of the main villain groups in Worm are white supremacists -- and one of the heroes is a kid who leaves that life. Two of the protagonist villains (brother and sister) are black. There's a lesbian couple -- one a hero, one a rogue/villain. There's a character who I think would be called genderqueer? One of the protagonists is asexual.

It sounds like a lot, but there's a huge cast of characters, and it never felt tacked-on to me.

And so much of the story is about really, really traumatic stuff. It's really dark, sometimes horrifying, sometimes tragic, sometimes awesome, and overall really gripping. It's sort of ruined mainstream superhero media for me -- it seems so flat and predictable in comparison.

Highly recommended.

One can look at it from another perspective -- when Walmart comes to town, typically they'll receive a tax break, which is an unfair advantage over a local grocery store. They'll also typically get a massive investment in terms of newly built infrastructure -- roads all around the lot, pipes, electricity, etc, compared to a local grocery store.

When you compare the revenue the WalMart (or any big box store) brings in compared to the amount of space it takes up (with a massive parking lot), it's typically WAY less than a small neighborhood grocery store built in the older traditional style. It's only because towns and cities have effectively subsidized these big-box stores that they've taken over. They're really a terrible deal for municipal governments in terms of economic benefits.

In many places (such as Texas), people don't consider space to be valuable because it's so plentiful -- which is true in one sense. But it's not just space we care about, it's infrastructure-supported space. Space that has roads to access it, water pipes, electricity, police and fire services, etc. will ALWAYS be scarce. These resources are expensive, and the more spread-out things are, the more money we're forced to spend on infrastructure.

This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly.

Oh, yeah. Prop 13 is like an order of magnitude worse than just taxing property + land vs a higher rate on land.

You're correct, but it's a completely different incentive. If you hold out and everyone around you improves their property, your taxes go up almost as much anyway! It punishes speculation and rewards productive use.

So a virtuous feedback cycle is created, where everyone is incentivized to improve and develop their property to the point where they're best taking advantage of the land it sits on -- or to sell it to someone who will.

I'm familiar with stamp duty -- it has a lot of problems, mainly around the fact that it discourages people from moving. It seems significantly worse than a land tax, to me.

Exactly. Taxing property encourages speculation and under-development.

Showing an alternative, Pennsylvania has several towns and cities with a split-rate tax, which means that there's a higher tax on the assessed land value than on the assessed value of the property. Taking this to an extreme, you can tax only the land value, not the property, providing a very strong incentive to make the best use of desirable land. A split rate tax just lets you turn the dial between typical property taxes and a land tax.

Many arguments in favor of the land value tax are based in concepts of economic rent and fairness. While I'm sympathetic to these arguments, I think the best argument is that it seems to work, both in theory and practice. Places that implement a split rate or land value tax tend to have fewer empty lots, parking lots, single-family homes in the middle of downtown, etc.

And not just that, but typical property taxes provide a disincentive to even improve your own property, since you'll pay more tax. They encourage blight.

It's not just California, it's everywhere. Tax policy isn't the only thing stopping us from avoiding sprawl by "thickening up" valuable areas of towns and cities, but it's a big one. Parking minimums are another, and of course zoning is yet another. All of them are important in terms of making our cities walkable, amenable to public transit, and sustainable environmentally.

*edit -- I should clarify that Prop-13 makes this effect worse in California than many places, though.

This is why I think H.R. 763 (in the US) is a well-designed bill. It taxes everything, and has a built-in tariff to serve as incentive to other countries to implement similar carbon taxes. I hope it passes. I believe it starts out at $15 per ton, then goes up by $10 per ton each year, with adjustments based on whether we're falling short of our greenhouse gas reduction goals, or greatly exceeding them.

There is a third way. Suburban single-family zones full of cul-de-sacs are designed to be metaphorically put under glass and never changed. Building massive towers, on the other hand, is very drastic and has the potential to destroy the character of a community.

I like the approach advocated by the Strong Towns movement: allow the next increment of development by right, everywhere. So a neighborhood of mostly single-family homes should allow accessory dwelling units (mother-in-law apartments) and conversion to duplexes by right. A neighborhood of duplexes should allow conversion to triplexes or quadplexes by right. A neighborhood of those should allow conversion to even denser development like townhomes, and multiplexes, etc. This allows a town or city to grow gradually and naturally.

The way they put it is, "No community should have to experience extreme change... but no community should be exempt from change". Wanting to build massive towers to address housing shortages is not ideal, but it's an understandable reaction, when it's illegal to address the shortage by having every neighborhood in the city "thicken up" a bit.

This is how the great cities we love all over the world became great -- through gradual, incremental change and intensification.

This is a common source of confusion, but carbohydrate intolerance is a symptom of diabetes, not a cause. Diabetics that go on Keto diets are still diabetic. If you give them a piece of toast, their blood sugar goes through the roof. It's like that joke about going to the doctor and saying "It hurts when I do this" and the doctor says "Well, don't do that anymore".

On the other hand, eating a whole-food plant based diet can actually reverse type 2 diabetes. People stabilize their blood sugar even while eating things like whole wheat bread, potatoes, rice and fruit, and generally have to have their insulin reduced and then eliminated to avoid hypoglycemia.

There is a theory gaining traction that insulin resistance is caused by fat in our muscle cells that somehow blocks the activity of insulin. So eating a very low-fat diet allows this fat to clear out, allowing insulin to work again, so you can eat carbs without your blood sugar spiking.

The fat in muscle cells is called "intramyocellular lipids". We know that it's associated with insulin resistance, the only debate is whether it's the cause or the effect, or if something else is causing both. Based on what I've read, I subscribe to the theory that it's the cause.

One tactic that seems like it will be very effective is to call or write your congressperson to let them know that you support H.R. 763. The bill has support from economists and scientists alike. It's designed not just to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but to do it in a way that minimizes impact on the economy, and also provides an incentive for other countries to pass similar legislation (by imposing tariffs on imports from countries that don't).

I suppose the question is not whether these people are a completely accurate representation of the country as a whole, but whether they will effectively serve as a dampening factor on corporate lobbyists. We shouldn't compare them against an unreachable ideal, but ask if they'll be an improvement on what we have now. I think they probably will.